Appearance and Reality/Appendix/Introduction
APPENDIX.
INTRODUCTION.
Instead of attempting a formal reply in detail to a number of criticisms, I have thought it more likely to assist the reader if I offer first some brief explanations as to the main doctrines of my book, and then follow these by a more particular notice of certain difficulties. My selection of the points discussed is, I fear, to some extent arbitrary, but I will ask my critics not to assume, where they fail to find a recognition of their objections, that I have treated these with disrespect.
I. With regard to the arrangement of my work I offer no defence. It was not in my power to write a systematic treatise, and, that being so, I thought the way I took was as good as any other. The order of the book seemed to myself a matter of no great importance. So far as I can see, whatever way I had taken the result would have been the same, and I must doubt if any other way would have been better for most readers. From whatever point we had begun we should have found ourselves entangled in the same puzzles, and have been led to attempt the same way of escape. The arrangement of the book does not correspond to the order of my thoughts, and the same would have been true of any other arrangement which it was in my power to adopt. I might very well, for instance, have started with the self as a given unity, and have asked how far any other things are real otherwise, and how far again the self satisfies its own demands on reality. Or I might have begun with the fact of knowledge and have enquired what in the end that involves, or I could once more readily have taken my departure from the ground of volition or desire. None of these ways would to myself have been really inconvenient, and they would all have led to the same end. But to satisfy at once the individual preference of each reader was not possible, nor am I sure that in the end the reader really is helped by starting on the road which he prefers. The want of system in my book is however another matter, and this I admit and regret.
II. The actual starting-point and basis of this work is an assumption about truth and reality. I have assumed that the object of metaphysics is to find a general view which will satisfy the intellect, and I have assumed that whatever succeeds in doing this is real and true, and that whatever fails is neither. This is a doctrine which, so far as I see, can neither be proved nor questioned. The proof or the question, it seems to me, must imply the truth of the doctrine, and, if that is not assumed, both vanish. And I see no advantage in dwelling further on this point.[1]
III. But with this we come against the great problem of the relation of Thought to Reality. For if we decline (as I think wrongly) to affirm that all truth is thought, yet we certainly cannot deny this of a great deal of truth, and we can hardly deny that truth satisfies the intellect. But, if so, truth therefore, as we have seen, is real. And to hold that truth is real, not because it is true but because also it is something else, seems untenable; for, if so, the something else left outside would make incomplete and would hence falsify the truth. But then, on the other hand, can thought, however complete, be the same as reality, the same altogether, I mean, and with no difference between them? This is a question to which I could never give an affirmative reply. It is useless here to seek to prove that the real involves thought as its sine quâ non, for that much, when proved, does not carry the conclusion. And it is useless again to urge that thought is so inseparable from every mode of experience that in the end it may be said to cover all the ground. That is, it seems to me, once more merely the inconclusive argument from the sine quâ non, or else the conclusion is vitiated from another side by the undue extension of thought’s meaning. Thought has now been taken, that is, to include so much more than truth in the narrow sense, that the old question as to how truth in this sense stands to reality, must break out more or less within thought itself. Nor again does it seem clear why we must term this whole ‘thought,’ and not ‘feeling,’ or ‘will,’ unless we can show that these really are modes of thought while thought cannot fall under them. For otherwise our conclusion seems but verbal and arbitrary; and again an argument drawn from the mere hegemony of thought could not prove the required conclusion.
But with this we are left, it appears, in a dilemma. There is a difference between on the one side truth or thought (it will be convenient now to identify these), and on the other side reality. But to assert this difference seems impossible without somehow transcending thought or bringing the difference into thought, and these phrases seem meaningless. Thus reality appears to be an Other different from truth and yet not able to be truly taken as different; and this dilemma to myself was long a main cause of perplexity and doubt. We indeed do something to solve it by the identification of being or reality with experience or with sentience in its widest meaning. This step I have taken without hesitation, and I will not add a further defence of it here. The most serious objection to it is raised, I think, from the side of Solipsism, and I have treated that at length. But this step by itself leaves us far from the desired solution of our dilemma; for between facts of experience and the thought of them and the truth about them the difference still remains, and the difficulty which attaches to this difference.
The solution of this dilemma offered in Chapter XV is, I believe, the only solution possible. It contains the main thesis of this work, views opposed to that thesis remaining, it seems to me, caught in and destroyed by the dilemma. And we must notice two main features in this doctrine. It contends on one side that truth or thought essentially does not satisfy its own claims, that it demands to be, and so far already is, something which completely it cannot be. Hence if thought carried out its own nature, it both would and would not have passed beyond itself and become also an Other. And in the second place this self-completion of thought, by inclusion of the aspects opposed to mere thinking, would be what we mean by reality, and by reality we can mean no more than this. The criticisms on this doctrine which I have seen, do not appear to me to rest on any serious enquiry either as to what the demands of thought really are, or what their satisfaction involves. But if to satisfy the intellect is to be true and real, such a question must be fundamental.
IV. With the solution of this problem about truth comes the whole view of Reality. Reality is above thought and above every partial aspect of being, but it includes them all. Each of these completes itself by uniting with the rest, and so makes the perfection of the whole. And this whole is experience, for anything other than experience is meaningless. Now anything that in any sense ‘is,’ qualifies the absolute reality and so is real. But on the other hand, because everything, to complete itself and to satisfy its own claims, must pass beyond itself, nothing in the end is real except the Absolute. Everything else is appearance; it is that the character of which goes beyond its own existence, is inconsistent with it and transcends it. And viewed intellectually appearance is error. But the remedy lies in supplementation by inclusion of that which is both outside and yet essential, and in the Absolute this remedy is perfected. There is no mere appearance or utter chance or absolute error, but all is relative. And the degree of reality is measured by the amount of supplementation required in each case, and by the extent to which the completion of anything entails its own destruction as such.[2]
V. But this Absolute, it has been objected, is a mere blank or else unintelligible. Certainly it is unintelligible if that means that you cannot understand its detail, and that throughout its structure constantly in particular you are unable to answer the question, Why or How. And that it is not in this sense intelligible I have clearly laid down. But as to its main character we must return a different reply. We start from the diversity in unity which is given in feeling, and we develop this internally by the principle of self-completion beyond self, until we reach the idea of an all-inclusive and supra-relational experience. This idea, it seems to me, is in the abstract intelligible and positive, and so once more is the principle by which it is reached; and the criticism which takes these as mere negations rests, I think, on misunderstanding. The criticism which really desires to be effective ought, I should say, to show that my view of the starting-point is untenable, and the principle of development, together with its result, unsound, and such criticism I have not yet seen. But with regard to what is unintelligible and inexplicable we must surely distinguish. A theory may contain what is unintelligible, so long as it really contains it; and not to know how a thing can be is no disproof of our knowing that it both must be and is. The whole question is whether we have a general principle under which the details can and must fall, or whether, on the other hand, the details fall outside or are negative instances which serve to upset the principle. Now I have argued in detail that there are no facts which fall outside the principle or really are negative instances; and hence, because the principle is undeniable, the facts both must and can comply with it, and therefore they do so. And given a knowledge of ‘how’ in general, a mere ignorance of ‘how’ in detail is permissible and harmless.[3] This argument in its general character is, I presume, quite familiar even to those critics who seem to have been surprised by it; and the application of it here is, so far as I see, legitimate and necessary. And for that application I must refer to the body of the work.
VI. With regard to the unity of the Absolute we know that the Absolute must be one, because anything experienced is experienced in or as a whole, and because anything like independent plurality or external relations cannot satisfy the intellect. And it fails to satisfy the intellect because it is a self-contradiction. Again for the same reason the Absolute is one system in the very highest sense of that term, any lower sense being unreal because in the end self-contradictory. The subjects of contradiction and of external relations are further dealt with in a later part of this Appendix, Notes A and B.
VII. I will go on to notice an objection which has been made by several critics. It is expressed in the following extract from the Philosophical Review, Vol. iv. p. 235: “All phenomena are regarded as infected with the same contradiction, in that they all involve a union of the One and the Many. It is therefore impossible to apply the notion of Degrees of Truth and Reality. If all appearances are equally contradictory, all are equally incapable of aiding us to get nearer to the ultimate nature of Reality.” And it is added that on this point there seems to be a consensus of opinion among my critics.
Now I think I must have failed to understand the exact nature of this point, since, as I understand it, it offers no serious difficulty. In fact this matter, I may say, is for good or for evil so old and so familiar to my mind that it did not occur to me as a difficulty at all, and so was not noticed. But suppose that in theology I say that all men before God, and measured by him, are equally sinful—does that preclude me from also holding that one is worse or better than another? And if I accept the fact of degrees in virtue, may I not believe also that virtue is one and is perfection and that you must attain to it or not? And is all this really such a hopeless puzzle? Suppose that for a certain purpose I want a stick exactly one yard long, am I wrong when I condemn both one inch and thirty-five inches, and any possible sum of inches up to thirty-six, as equally and alike coming short? Surely if you view perfection and completeness in one way, it is a case of either Yes or No, you have either reached it or not, and there either is defect or there is none. But in the imperfect, viewed otherwise, there is already more or less of a quality or character, the self-same character which, if all defect were removed, would attain to and itself would be perfection. Wherever there is a scale of degrees you may treat the steps of this as being more or less perfect, or again you may say, No they are none of them perfect, and so regarded they are equal, and there is no difference between them. That indeed is what must happen when you ask of each whether it is perfect or not.
This question of Yes or No I asked about appearances in connection with Reality, and I have in my book used language which certainly contradicts itself, unless the reader perceives that there is more than one point of view. And I assumed that the reader would perceive this, and I cannot doubt that very often he has done so, and I think that even always he might have done so, if he would but carry into metaphysics all the ideas with which he is acquainted outside, and not an arbitrary selection from them. And among the ideas to be thus treated not as true but as at least existing, I would instance specially some leading ideas of the Christian religion as to freedom, the worth of mere morality, and the independent self-sufficiency of finite persons and things. For myself, though I have not hesitated to point out the falsity and immorality of some Christian doctrines (where this seemed necessary), I cannot approve of the widespread practice of treating them as devoid even of existence.
But if, after all, my critics had in view not the above but something else, and if the objection means that I do not explain why and how there is any diversity and anything like degree at all, I am at no loss for a reply. I answer that I make no pretence to do this. But on the other side I have urged again and again that a general conclusion is not upset by a failure to explain in detail, unless that detail can be shown to be a negative instance.
If finally the use of the phrase “mere appearance” has caused difficulty, that has been I think already explained above. This phrase gets its meaning by contrast with the Absolute. When you ask about any appearance unconditionally whether it is Reality or not, Yes or No, you are forced to reply No, and you may express that unconditional No by using the word ‘mere.’ At least one of my critics would, I think, have done well if, before instructing me as to the impossibility of any mere appearance, he had consulted my index under the head of Error.
I must end by saying that, on this question of degrees of appearance and reality, I have found but little to which my critics can fairly object, unless their position is this, that of two proper and indispensable points of view I have unduly emphasized one. Whether I have done this or not I will not attempt to decide, but, if this is what my critics have meant, I cannot felicitate them on their method of saying it.
But I would once more express my regret that I was not able to deal systematically with the various forms of appearance. If I had done this, it would have become clear that, and how, each form is true as well as untrue, and that there is an evolution of truth. We should have seen that each really is based on, and is an attempt to realize, the same principle, a principle which is not wholly satisfied by any, and which condemns each because each is an inadequate appearance of itself.
VIII. I must now touch briefly on a point of greater difficulty. Why, it has been asked, have I not identified the Absolute with the Self? Now, as I have already remarked, my whole view may be taken as based on the self; nor again could I doubt that a self, or a system of selves, is the highest thing that we have. But when it is proposed to term the Absolute ‘self,’ I am compelled to pause. In order to reach the idea of the Absolute our finite selves must suffer so much addition and so much subtraction that it becomes a grave question whether the result can be covered by the name of ‘self.’ When you carry out the idea of a self or of a system of selves beyond a certain point, when, that is to say, you have excluded, as such, all finitude and change and chance and mutability—have you not in fact carried your idea really beyond its proper application? I am forced to think that this is so, and I also know no reason why it should not be so. The claim of the individual, as such, to perfection I wholly reject. And the argument that, if you scruple to say ‘self,’ you are therefore condemned to accept something lower, seems to me thoroughly unsound. I have contended that starting from the self one can advance to a positive result beyond it, and my contention surely is not met by such a bare unreasoned assumption of its falsity. And if finally I hear, Well, you yourself admit that the Absolute is unintelligible; why then object to saying that the Absolute somehow unintelligibly is self and the self is somehow unintelligibly absolute?—that gives me no trouble. For the Absolute, though in detail unintelligible, is not so in general, and its general character comes as a consequence from a necessary principle. And against this consequence we have to set nothing but privation and ignorance. But to make the self, as such, absolute is, so far as I see, to postulate in the teeth of facts, facts which go to show that the self’s character is gone when it ceases to be relative. And this postulate itself, I must insist, is no principle at all, but is a mere prejudice and misunderstanding. And the claim of this postulate, if made, should in my opinion be made openly and explicitly. But as to the use of the word ‘self,’ so long only as we know what we mean and do not mean by it, I am far from being irreconcilable. I am of course opposed to any attempt to set up the finite self as in any sense ultimately real, or again as real at all outside of the temporal series. And I am opposed once more to any kind of attempt to make the distinction between ‘experience’ and ‘the experienced’ more than relative. But on these and on other points I do not think that it would prove useful to enlarge further.
IX. I will now briefly touch on my attitude towards Scepticism. Most persons, I think, who have read my book intelligently, will credit me with a desire to do justice to scepticism; and indeed I might claim, perhaps, myself to be something of a sceptic. But with all my desire I, of course, may very well have failed; and it would be to me most instructive if I could see an examination of my last Chapter by some educated and intelligent sceptic. Up to the present, however, nothing of the kind has been brought to my notice; and perhaps the sceptical temper does not among us often go with addiction to metaphysics. And I venture to think this a misfortune. Intellectual scepticism certainly is not one thing with a sceptical temper, and it is (if I may repeat myself) “the result only of labour and education.”
That, it seems, is not the opinion of the writer in Mind (N. S., No. 11), who has come forward as the true representative of the sceptics. He will, perhaps, not be surprised when I question his right to that position, and when I express my conviction of his ignorance as to what true scepticism is. His view of scepticism is, in brief, that it consists in asking, “But what do you mean?” The idea apparently has not occurred to him that to question or doubt intelligently you must first understand. If I, for instance, who know no mathematics, were to reiterate about some treatise on the calculus, “But what does it mean?” I should hardly in this way have become a sceptic mathematically. Scepticism of this kind is but a malady of childhood, and is known as one symptom of imbecility, and it surely has no claim to appear as a philosophical attitude.
If about any theory you desire to ask intelligently the question, “What does it mean?” you must be prepared, I should have thought, to enter into that theory. And attempting to enter into it you are very liable, in raising your doubts, to base yourself tacitly on some dogma which the theory in question has given its reason for rejecting. And to avoid such crude dogmatism is not given to every man who likes to call himself a sceptic. And it is given to no man, I would repeat, without labour and education.
But in the article which I have cited there is, apart from this absurd idea about scepticism, nothing we need notice. There are some mistakes and failures to comprehend of an ordinary type, coupled with some mere dogmatism of an uninteresting kind. And it is to myself a matter of regret that generally in this point I have been helped so little by my critics, and am compelled (if I may use the expression) still to do most of my scepticism for myself.[4]
X. The doctrine of this work has been condemned as failing to satisfy the claims of our nature, and has been charged with being after all no better than “Agnosticism.” Now without discussing the meaning of this term—a subject in which I am not much at home—I should like to insist on what to me seems capital. According to the doctrine of this work that which is highest to us is also in and to the Universe most real, and there can be no question of its reality being somehow upset. In common-place Materialism, on the other hand, that which in the end is real is certainly not what we think highest, this latter being a secondary and, for all we know, a precarious result of the former. And again, if we embrace mere ignorance, we are in the position that, for anything we know, our highest beliefs are illusions, or at any moment may become so, and at any moment may be brought to nought by something—we do not know what. And I submit that the difference between such doctrines and those of this work is really considerable.
And if I am told that generally the doctrines of this book fail to satisfy our nature’s demands, I would request first a plain answer to a question which, I think, is plain. Am I to understand that somehow we are to have all that we want and have it just as we want it? For myself I should reply that such a satisfaction seems to me impossible. But I do not feel called on to criticise this demand, until I see it stated explicitly; and at present I merely press for a plain answer to my question.
And if the real question is not this, and if it concerns only the satisfaction somehow of our nature’s main claims, I do not see that, as compared with other views about the world, the view of this work is inferior. I am supposing it to be compared of course only with views that aim at theoretical consistency, and not with mere practical beliefs. Practical beliefs, we know, are regulated by working efficiency. They emphasize one point here, and they suppress another point there, without much care to avoid a theoretical self-contradiction. And working beliefs of any kind, I imagine, can more or less exist under and together with any kind of theoretical doctrine. The comparison I have in view here is of another order, and would be made between doctrines each of which claimed to be a true and consistent account of the whole of things. Such a comparison I do not propose to make, since it would require much space, and, while perhaps serving little purpose otherwise, could not fail to give great offence. But there are two conditions of any fair comparison on which I would insist. In a question about the satisfaction of our nature all the aspects of that nature must first be set forth, and not a one-sided distortion of these or an arbitrary selection from them. And in the second place every side of the doctrines compared must be stated without suppression of any features that may be found inconvenient. For every view of the world, we must all agree, has its own special difficulties. Where, for instance, from a theistic or a Christian point of view a writer condemns, say, a “naturalistic” account of good and evil—would that writer, if he had a desire for fairness and truth, fail to recall the fact that his own view also has been morally condemned? Would he forget that the relation of an omniscient moral Creator to the things of his hand has given trouble intellectually, and is morally perhaps not from all sides “comfortable?” His attitude, I judge, would be otherwise, and this judgment, I submit, is that of every fair-minded man, whatever doctrines otherwise he may hold. Nothing is easier than to make a general attack on any doctrine while the alternative is ignored, and few things, I would add, are, at least in philosophy, less profitable. With this I will pass to a special treatment of some difficult problems.
Footnote
- ↑ On the subject of the order of thought in my work I further refer the reader to Note A in this Appendix.
- ↑ On the question of degrees of appearance see more in § VII.
- ↑ In this connection I may quote a passage from Stricker, [Studien über die] Bewegungsvorstellungen, s. 35, Ein Lehrsatz wird nicht dadurch erschüttert, dass Jemand einherkommt, und uns von einer Beobachtung berichtet, die er mit Hilfe dieses Lehrsatzes nicht zu deuten vermag. Erschüttert wird ein Lehrsatz durch eine neue Beobachtung nur dann, wenn sich zeigen lässt, dass sie ihm geradezu widerspricht.
- ↑ I may mention here that to a criticism of this work by Mr. Ward, in Mind, N. S., No. 9, I, perhaps hastily, replied in the next number of that journal. I should doubt if in the criticism or the reply anything calls for the reader’s attention, but, if he desires to see them, I have given the reference.